Virtual reality exposure therapies are being seen through the scientific eyes. Phobias and VRET : what does scientific research teach us ? The 32-year-old president of the Global Future 2045 Congress is dead set on living forever.Įditor's Note : This article was updated on June 19, 2013, to correct the dates of the Global Future 2045 International Congress (it was held June 15-16, not June 14-15, as previously stated.)įollow Tanya Lewis on Twitter and Google+. Follow us Facebook & Google+. Those of the "Penrose school" think uploading the brain would have to involve quantum computers - a development unlikely to happen by 2045.īut Itskov thinks otherwise. Penrose argued that consciousness is a quantum mechanical phenomenon arising from the fabric of the universe. Physicist Roger Penrose of the University of Oxford and others disagree with the interpretation of the brain as a mere computer. In parallel with the talk of brain technologies and mind-uploading, much was said about the nature of consciousness in the universe. Even mindclone procreation and reanimation after death were mentioned. Then, there are mind-clone civil rights, which would be the "cause célèbre" for the 21st century, Rothblatt said. Continuity of the self is one issue, because your persona would no longer inhabit just a biological body. Rothblatt went on to discuss the implications of creating mindclones.
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On the contrary, software and hardware are as good as wet ware, or biological materials, she argued. Some critics have shunned what Rothblatt called "spooky Cartesian dualism," arguing that the mind must be embedded in biology.
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She cited one definition of life as a self-replicating code that maintains itself against disorder. "The first company that develops mindware will have a thousand Googles," Rothblatt said.īut would such a mindclone be alive? Rothblatt thinks so. This mindfile would be run on "mindware," a kind of software for consciousness. She described how the mind clones are created from a "mindfile," a sort of online repository of our personalities, which she argued humans already have (in the form of Facebook, for example). Rothblatt introduced the concept of "mindclones" - digital versions of humans that can live forever. Even the title of Rothblatt's talk was provocative: "The Purpose of Biotechnology is the End of Death." The conference took a surreal turn when Martine Rothblatt - a lawyer, author and entrepreneur, and CEO of biotech company United Therapeutics Corp. He has successfully tested the device in rats and monkeys, and is now working with human patients. That signal is passed into a computer where it is mathematically transformed and then fed back into the brain, where it gets sealed in as a long-term memory. The device records the electrical activity that encodes a simple short-term memory (such as pushing a button) and converts it to a digital signal. Berger aims to replace part of the brain's hippocampus, the region that converts short-term memories into long-term ones, with a BCI. Theodore Berger, a neural engineer at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, is taking BCIs to a new level by developing a memory prosthesis. Carmena and Maharbiz spoke of the challenge of making a BCI that works stably over time and does not require being tethered to wires. These devices consist of pill-size electrode arrays that record neural signals from the brain's motor areas, which are then decoded by a computer and used to control a computer cursor or prosthetic limb (such as a robotic arm). José Carmena and Michel Maharbiz, electrical engineers at the University of California, Berkeley, are working to develop state-of-the-art motor BCIs. Many groups are now developing BCIs to restore motor skills, following damage to the nervous system from a stroke or spinal cord injury. The cochlear implant - in which the brain's cochlear nerve is electronically stimulated to restore a sense of sound to someone who is hard of hearing - was the first true BCI. Substantial achievements have been made in the field of brain-computer interfaces, or BCIs (also called brain-machine interfaces). The reality, however, is that neural engineering is making significant strides toward modeling the brain and developing technologies to restore or replace some of its biological functions. The idea sounds like sci-fi, and it is - at least for now. Specifically, they believe that in a few decades, humans will be able to upload their minds to a computer, transcending the need for a biological body. Itskov and other so-called "transhumanists" interpret this impending singularity as digital immortality. By 2045, "based on conservative estimates of the amount of computation you need to functionally simulate a human brain, we'll be able to expand the scope of our intelligence a billion-fold," Kurzweil said.
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